Menu

Saul Steinberg

“Saul Steinberg, the artist, said one of the major problems for the creative person is to avoid boredom. . . . If I’m bored, the reader is bored. There are writers that we know—we needn’t name them—I don’t understand why they don’t die of boredom at the typewriter. And they sell millions of copies.” William Gaddis in conversation with Malcolm Bradbury, on the occasion of the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic.

Dalkey Archive, publisher of new editions of both The Recognitions and J R, is doing their 10 books for $65/20 books for $120 winter sale right now. Be not bored.

OTHER/ALTRO is what I am not, what is different from me, what I move toward and never reach.

America, the idea of America, for me, grown up in Italy, has always been OTHER/ALTRO.

Even now that I live in America, I am interested in an America where I am not, that is far from me.

Growing up, America for me was a book translated into Italian by Cesare Pavese, Moby Dick. America was Edgar Allan Poe translated, reinvented by Giorgio Manganelli. America was The Discovery of America by Saul Steinberg, a book so beautiful that I kept it under my bed. America was Robert Crumb Draws the Blues, Charlie Patton tattoed on my arm.

America is this book that I read a month ago, and love: Because I Was Flesh, The Autobiography of Edward Dahlberg. I have never seen Dahlberg’s America. Nobody ever did. It’s Kansas City colliding with Ancient Greece.

I have spent the last twenty minutes trying to find a paragraph to quote, to give an idea of how unique this book is, and I couldn’t pick any, because every paragraph, sentence, word in this book is a surprise.

Because I Was Flesh is one of the best autobiographies I have ever read. It pushes the limits of genre, language, style, taste, and at the same time manages to keep the rhythm of the page flowing. What really strikes me is the imagery, often delirious: “Let the bard from Smyrna catalogue Harma, the ledges and caves of Ithaca, the milk-fed damsels of Achaia, pigeon-flocked Thisbe or the woods of Onchestus, I sing of Oak, Walnut, Chestnut, Maple and Elm Streets. Phthia was a bin of corn, Kansas City a buxom grange of wheat. Could the strumpets from the stews of Corinth, Ephesus or Tarsus fetch a groan or sigh more quickly than the dimpled thighs of lasses from St. Joseph or Topeka?”